La Femme de Gilles – Madeleine Bourdouxhe (1937, transl. Faith Evans 1992) 122 pages

La Femme de Gilles is a curious read from a twenty-first century perspective. The protagonist Elisa is entirely bound up in her husband Gilles. Her existence is wholly for him: cooking for him, keeping his house, bearing his children that she loves only as an extension of him, sexual pleasure derived solely from pleasing him. It’s the extremity of these feelings at the obliteration of any personal motivation for her actions outside of Gilles that make her so extraordinary to my eyes.

So when Gilles starts an affair with Elisa’s sister Victorine, outwardly Elisa does very little:

“Whatever happened, whatever had already happened, the main thing was not to make a fuss, simply to watch, and act in subtle little ways to keep intact the love with which she’d surrounded him, and to which he would return one day. There was no escape from a love as strong as hers.”

Elisa’s initial realisation is heartbreaking, as she turns her back on Gilles and Victorine to get ready and accompany them to the cinema:

“One by one she fixed her gaze on some of the objects around her, things that made up her familiar world, then her eyes lit on her own hands as they closed the bag, and she saw they were trembling. Precisely at that moment Elisa knew that behind her back there was another world, a world that was complicated, threatening, unknown.”

In a such a short space, Bourdouxhe creates an acute psychological portrait, primarily of Elisa, but also of her unintentionally cruel husband and her vacuous sister:

“Afterwards it’s a question of trying to make sense of things, sense of life, and life doesn’t touch Victorine, it will never mark her smile or her eyes, which will stay young, clear, innocent for a long time. Unconscious offenders are the most dangerous of criminals.”

Yet she also sustains a real momentum to a story which primarily takes place in Elisa’s tortured head, and follows her inaction. It feels pacy and tense, even as Bourdouxhe steps outside of the narrative to directly address her characters:

“You are alone with the greatest pain you have ever known.”

Poor Elisa really is isolated. She can’t speak with her husband, her sister or her mother. The villagers in the remote area where she lives become aware and gossip about her. But Elisa doesn’t really want to leave, she just wants things to be as they once were:

“Going from one place to another – is that really the world, or is it rather something very small, invisible, confused, something buried inside of us, something that we always take with us wherever we are, whether we’re here, or whether we are there? Whether we are far away or at home?”

La Femme de Gilles is an immersive read with incisive characterisation. Apparently Simone de Beauvoir was a fan (I tried to find what she said about it in the The Second Sex but my edition has a rubbish index). In her first novel, Bourdouxhe created a haunting narrative which I’m sure will stay with me.